This stage of Beginning

It’s all going on here – albeit at a comfortable pace!

Lots of action on the domestic front as we implement this new phase of family life without a teenager ever-present.

Evenings and weekends spent clearing out, cleaning up and redecorating. It’s been a long time coming, mind you.

We’ve been based in this home for eleven years and since we quit our nomadic travels and I established this creative business, the home has become full to bursting with us, our stuff, our hopes and our dreams.

It’s time for a new beginning, to free ourselves up again and to break through the barriers we’ve established over the last few years.

Great Round of Mandala Synchronicity

No coincidence that Stage Four of the Great Round of Mandala is called Beginning. In fact, I rarely see anything but synchronicity with the Great Round any more.

I’ve been working on this stage a small step at a time for weeks and although we’re well into our study of the fifth stage of the Great Round in Mandala Magic, I’ve let this one create itself as slowly as was needed.

It seems that all the work I’m doing right now involves stripping things back to the very core. The medicine journeys, the domestics and ever more so in my creative exercises.

This set of mandalas is no exception. Right back to basics in terms of form and colour.

I call this one the ‘mother mandala’ – symbolically representing the mother’s breast, the ultimate symbol of nurturing young life. A time when that which was sown and incubated over the dark months now comes into being in the most tender of guises.

Each of the three mandalas were created in the same way. The outlines made using a Pigma Micron fineliner from Sakura and the colours made with Letraset Promarkers and a Copic Ciao twin marker.

This ‘faith mandala’ utilises the alchemical symbol for fire – the upward pointing triangle, representing the rising of the masculine energies and the action-oriented phase of spring.

It’s easy to mistake this shift of energies as the domain of reason and intellect alone and feel aggrieved at leaving the comfort of the yin realms, where everything is soft and fluid.

When we can clear everything out of the way and do the inner work to ensure that any actions we take are in response to the Truth of our own Being, then these new energies are highly valued in their ability to see us answer the call of our Soul.

Often, we have been so damaged by this always-on, always-doing culture that we fail to recognise the sublime beauty of this balance of yin and yang. We may fail to see the exquisite logic of both sides of the coin.

It’s true that there may be much healing to do in the in-between.

For now, I’m seeing this become ever more refined in my own practice as each day I bow down to That which I truly am – and I’m so grateful to the masculine in my own being which helps me realise that which my womb so lovingly incubates.

April sees the garden begin to bloom after the long, dark winter and although the trees don’t pull on their canopy of leaves until May in my corner of the world, colour abounds in the form of primroses, tulips and daffodils.

Such a welcome sight, and this ‘nature mandala’ reminds me of my own potential to bloom into this earthly incarnation of Divine spirit.

Each spring I find myself deeply relieved that the dark is over with for another cycle. Much though I welcome the dark each year, I am always ready to wave farewell and greet this new time of light and of life.

This year, from deep within the sensations of this experience, the next phase of my everyday being has been revealed to me and this clarity is so very welcome.

Stage Four’s Found Inspirations

As my connection to the work we do in Mandala Magic continues to evolve, I find myself endlessly grateful for the robustness of the Great Round as a structure with which I can relate my very Existence to.

This year, one part of my process is to create the #FoundInspirations poetry from the Mandala Magic Guidebooks before I settle to making the mandalas in my art journal.

Here is the selection of secret messages that made itself known to me in April.

Can you find any that resonate with your experience? (Click on the image to increase the size and read the text more easily.)